Enterprises and other organizations may manage large installations of network-attached machines such as computers, mobile devices, servers, and network infrastructure. The number of managed network-attached devices is likely to continue to increase as networking capabilities are added to more classes of devices, up to and including large numbers of ubiquitous embedded devices. Often, identical management information must be provided to large classes of managed devices. For example, the same security certificate revocation information may be provided to every secure-boot-enabled machine managed by an enterprise. Typical approaches for installing management information include multicasting management information to a large class of homogeneous machines in parallel. However, such approaches typically require synchronization between the sender and receivers, meaning that a large number of receiving devices may be required to synchronize their activity (for example, by listening for multicast information at the same time). Another typical approach for installing management information includes downloading management information from a server by an operating system component or user-mode software application in response to a user request or as a scheduled download. However, such approaches may require user intervention and may be vulnerable to malware and/or security exploits of the operating system and/or software application.
Rateless erasure codes, also known as fountain codes, encode a finite set of k input symbols into an unbounded set of encoded symbols. The input symbols may be decoded from any k′ encoded symbols, where k′ may be equal to k or slightly larger than k. Common fountain codes include Luby transform codes (LT codes) and Raptor codes. Typical uses for fountain codes include encoding video signals for delivery over an internet protocol (IP) network.